Separatist Kurdish rebels killed five soldiers and a policeman in Turkey's south-east in the wake of deadly Kurdish riots in the region, officials said Wednesday.
Two of the soldiers were killed while on patrol in the mountains of Sirnak province near Iraq when they stepped on a landmine planted by militants of the rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), the office of the local governor said in a statement.
Three others were shot dead in an ambush as security forces launched a search operation in the area to hunt down those responsible for the mine attack.
The statement said two PKK militants "were rendered ineffective" in the ensuing clash, without specifying whether they were killed or captured.
Two soldiers were injured, the NTV news channel reported, and the military operation in the area was continuing.
Separately, a policemen died from injuries sustained during a PKK attack on a police station in the province of Bingol, hospital sources said.
The officer was wounded late Tuesday when rebels opened fire with automatic weapons on the police station in the town of Genc.
More than 37,000 people have been killed since 1984, when the PKK - considered a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union - took up arms for Kurdish self-rule in south-eastern Turkey.
The latest deaths followed a week of violence that claimed 15 lives as Kurdish rioters clashed with security forces in Istanbul and Turkey's Kurdish-majority south-east.
Police opened fire to disperse the demonstrators, many of them in their teens, who torched banks and public buildings, vandalised shops and threw Molotov cocktails.
The death toll included three women killed Sunday in Istanbul when a petrol bomb attack set a bus on fire, causing it to crash into another vehicle.
The Turkish government has accused the PKK of orchestrating the unrest that first erupted on March 28 in Diyarbakir, the biggest city in south-east Turkey, after the funerals of PKK militants killed in clashes with the army.
Comments
Comments are closed.